Data-driven, Dynamic and Dynamite: Welcome to the New Era of Display

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Greg founded Delve over 7 years ago to help clients make sense of their data to execute efficient media buying. With nearly two decades of experience in digital marketing Greg understands how to deliver high ROI for his clients through programmatic media buying with a unique analytics approach. Prior to founding Delve Greg has also held senior marketing positions at Digitas, Bath & Body Works, Community Connect and ooVoo. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Clark University.

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Greg Sobiech, CEO of Delve, gives us insights into why the future belongs to 1:1 marketing. The article is based on a case study done by BookIt

As modern marketers, we could not survive without data. We use data to tell us where to spend our ad budgets, what platforms to invest in, and what agencies or brands to partner with. We need data to tell us how effective our campaigns have been and how we can optimize them to squeeze more ROI out of every dollar.

Predictive Marketing Analytics Buyers Guide for SMBs

Technologies offering advanced analytics, was once a domain only large enterprises could afford investing in.

What we generally don’t do, however, is allow data to drive creative content. And that can be a costly mistake.

Despite the prevalence of paid search, display ads are increasingly a key component of brand messaging. According to eMarketer, investments in video, rich media, and banner ads exceeded investments in search ads for the first time in 2016, and the gap increases every year. That means brand creative is more important than ever.

At the same time, consumers who have been seduced by the personalization they encounter when shopping at Amazon or watching shows on Netflix are demanding the same experience across the web. They don’t want to see a generic travel ad for an island vacation; they want to receive offers customized for a family of four traveling with a car seat and a dog and for a beach destination that’s also within two hours of a major amusement park.

That kind of hyper-personalization gets results. But if you’re going to segment ads for different audiences, you also need to create custom content for those segments. The problem: even with an enormous staff and an unlimited budget, creating a unique banner ad for a single audience segment can take weeks.

Fortunately, there are now more tools out there like the Google Marketing Platform that enable data-driven creative that changes dynamically based on consumer personas.

Destination personalization

Emerging tools for dynamic creative are making campaigns like our travel example a reality.

BookIt, for example, is a travel marketer that specializes in low-cost vacation packages. The company wanted a way to develop custom creative for each of its primary audience segments – like families with small children, a single mom traveling with two kids, seniors taking their grandchildren on a trip, and so on.

The company also wanted creative to reflect any promotions such as “kids stay free” and for banner ads to reflect up-to-the-minute pricing based on location and other factors. All told, some 20 different audience dimensions had to be reflected in each ad. Until recently, handling that many variables would have been impossible, but the campaign team was able to use data-driven technology, in this case Google Studio (now part of Display & Video 360) to automate creative production in an efficient way.

This new generation of tools enables marketers to connect to any dataset, map variables to artifacts in a banner ad, and render an unlimited number of banners dynamically and in real time.

BookIt was also able to capture insights about visitors to its website and understand how previous campaigns had performed. From this, the team could assess things like how seasonality influences buying behavior for different audience segments. That analysis informed its strategy for how to uniquely target each segment with different destinations, deals, and hotels.

The campaign incorporated beautiful hi-res images for different travel destinations which were delivered along with customized messaging to each persona. As the platform identified each persona, the right ad was displayed to the right person at the right time, including custom creative.

Most important, data-driven creative increased new visitors to BookIt’s site by nearly a third and boosted revenue by 20 percent.

All creative must be custom creative

Brand marketers know aesthetics matter and that the quality of creative can make or break a brand. Now performance marketers are benefitting from that wisdom as well.

Dynamic, data-driven creative can deliver higher click-through rates and a better return on ad spend. Brands that want to grow rapidly by delivering relevant messages to their customers need to invest in the right data infrastructure to support this kind of dynamic creative. As BookIt discovered, the ROI potential is significant. Clearly, the future belongs to 1:1 marketing.